Ambient art (artist's book).
For “Crickets,” artist Mungo Thomson has collaborated with composer Michael Webster to transcribe field recordings of crickets from around the world into a musical score. The result is a dynamic composition for a 17-person classical ensemble: violin, flute, clarinet, and percussion. The score contains 25 chapters, or “movements,” such as “12. Reunion Island, the Cirque de Cilaos at 1,300 m altitude, February 1998, nightfall in a banana plantation.” “Crickets” was performed in Los Angeles as part of The Pacific Standard Time Public Art and Performance Festival (2012), and this year a concert will take place on the High Line in New York.
Mungo Thomson is an artist whose work frequently touches on silence, blank space, and cultural motifs around reception. “Crickets” sums up Thomson's interests in ambience and in audience succinctly: crickets are such a ubiquitous aural backdrop that they have come to stand in for silence, and in the realm of performance, crickets are what is heard when a performance bombs.
Mungo Thomson (born 1969 in Davis, California) is an artist based in Los Angeles. His wide-ranging, multi-media work approaches mass culture and everyday perceptual experience through a lens of deep time and cosmic scale, implicating the spaces of production and exhibition in ever-widening extrapolations. He has convened an orchestral ensemble to perform a score transcribed from the chirping of crickets, persuaded museums to let their incoming mail pile up unopened in the galleries for the run of an exhibition, and replaced the coat-hangers in the Whitney Museum's coat check with custom-made hangers modeled on orchestral triangles, transforming it into an enormous musical instrument.
Mungo Thomson has exhibited in Canada, China, the United States and Europe.
Michael Webster (born 1966 in Berkeley) is a composer and recording artist based in Los Angeles. He is the author of many art songs as well as two chamber operas which have received performances in The United States, Latin America and Europe. He is known for a special sensitivity to rhetoric and the rhythms of speech—producing settings of text in which speed and meter are fluid. A founding member of the seminal LA psychedelic group "The Native Shrubs of the Santa Monica Mountains", Webster has also recorded two solo albums and worked in the studio as an arranger and sideman with artists as diverse as Tracy Chapman, Van Dyke Parks, the Circle Jerks and Winnie the Pooh. Webster has also worked with and for many visual artists including
Sharon Lockhart, Kerry Tribe, Bruce Yonemoto, and Jeff Koons, and is half of performance-art duo "Shakeys" with Joe Sola. He is currently finishing a multi-year project "Nice Day for the Races", an opera/film from a radio play by Samuel Beckett.
